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Consomme Tomate
Prepare and strain a consomme into a saucepan. Place a pint tomato sauce in a small saucepan and let reduce on the range to half the quantity, then strain it through a cheesecloth into the consomme, let boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a full one: it assumes you already have consommé and tomato sauce on hand, both of which the same book treats as basic preparations. The whole point is clarity, so everything hinges on how you handle the tomato.
- Quantities to work fromA pint of tomato sauce reduced by half gives one cup of concentrate. The recipe does not say how much consommé to use, so the proportion is left to the cook; keep the tomato well in the minority or the soup stops being a consommé and becomes a thin tomato soup.
- The hinge: keep it clearReduce the tomato sauce separately and strain it through damp cheesecloth before it goes anywhere near the consommé. Tomato pulp and starch will cloud a clarified stock instantly, and once clouded there is no fixing it short of a second raft clarification.
- What "tomato sauce" meant hereNot a modern pasta sauce. In classic French practice of this period tomato sauce was a roux-thickened, stock-based sauce with tomato, rather than a raw or lightly cooked purée laced with garlic, oregano or olive oil. Canned tomato purée thinned with stock is the closer substitute.
- Reducing without scorchingA thickened sauce catches on the bottom of the pan as it reduces. Use a heavy saucepan, keep it at a bare simmer and stir the base regularly; a scorched note carries straight through a clear soup with nothing to hide behind.
- "On the range"Simply stovetop, as against the oven or a bain-marie. No temperature is implied beyond a steady simmer.
- The five-minute boilThe recipe calls for a five-minute boil. A hard rolling boil will agitate any remaining fine particles back into suspension, so keep it at a gentle boil for the five minutes, and skim any fat beading on the surface before serving.
- Seasoning at the endNeither component's seasoning is specified here, and reducing the sauce will concentrate whatever salt it carries. Taste only after the two are combined.
- ServingThe recipe simply pours the finished soup into a tureen; served hot in cups or soup plates, with nothing added.
Consommé tomate belongs to the long list of named clear soups that French professional kitchens codified from the nineteenth century onward, with the fullest codification of garnished consommés coming in the early twentieth century, in which a single garnish or flavouring earns the soup its own entry on the menu: consommé julienne, consommé brunoise, consommé célestine, consommé tomate. The logic of that system is why this entry is so brief. The book has already told the cook how to make consommé and how to make tomato sauce, so the recipe for the finished soup is only the sentence explaining how they meet. Tomato itself was a comparatively late arrival to that repertoire, treated in the classic sauce books as a thickened, stock-based sauce rather than the raw or lightly cooked purée we now assume, which is why the instruction is to reduce and strain a sauce rather than to add tomatoes.